Surviving the apocalypse

The post-apocalyptic worlds that we've seen showing in the movies and TVs lately were zombie infestation, viral outbreaks, alien invasions, doomsday prophecies, etc. It's getting a bit over-repetitive and boring, too much drama, and there were so many of such movies that came out before and after our supposedly the end of the world (Remember 21 December 2012?). I suppose that why reading this book was much more refreshing and has more sense of reality to it.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which was adapted to a movie in 2009, was about the survival of a father and son in a post-apocalyptic world of unknown cause. What I like about the story of this book was purely about survival; about finding resources such as food and water as they continually battle against hunger and thirst; about protecting themselves against the elements; about protecting their belongings against thieves and robbers as their lives depended on it; about not trusting anyone; about something as tedious but important as whether to build a fire at night to keep warm but risk attracting unwanted attention or not to build a fire and risk suffering in the cold night; about struggling to keep themselves sane; about not losing their humanity, their hopes and their faiths.

The names of the father and son were never mentioned. Appropriately, names seemed to be irrelevant here. The father did everything he can to keep both of them alive as they headed south, hopefully to escape the winter cold. The son, while depended on his father, help keep his father alive as well. Without someone to love and protect, the father would have just given up on life, maybe even commit suicide.

Aside from the mysterious and unknown cataclysmic disaster that seemed to burn the entire world to ash and destroyed the Earth's biosphere, everything else in this doomsday scenario was very realistic. Sustenance was made especially difficult for them as there was no plant life to forage or animals to hunt, and water was always filled with ash. Cannibalism was a real danger to them.

I was really engrossed in this book. No wonder it won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and received positive reviews from book critics and environmentalists. A five-star book!!